[[7]] i.e., Love.
[[8]] i.e., Love.
[[9]] i.e., they all lack Maheshwara's third eye, which consumed Love's body with a fiery glance, when the audacious little deity dared to inspire the Great God himself with passion for Párwatí as she stood before him.
[[10]] The English reader should bear in mind, that, in Sanskrit, recollection and love are often, as here, denoted by the same word.
[[11]] Nothing in India is so delightful as the grace with which the women, even the oldest and the ugliest, handle that part of their garment that serves them for a veil. It is an everlasting beauty to see them, as they walk along the street, quietly drawing it around them: a thing lost among us altogether, like its motive.
[[12]] There is a play on the word, which means also a woman.
[[13]] This is the swayamwara, or self-choice of a bridegroom, everywhere exemplified in old Hindoo tales.
[[14]] This is substantially a quotation from Manu: only it is not the Guru, but the Guru's wife, whom the pupil is there forbidden to approach. The princess plays upon the sex.
[[15]] In the swayamwara ceremony, the mark of selection was the placing of a garland around the successful wooer's neck, by the hands of the bride herself.
[[16]] A species of Arisæma, which we call "cobra-lily," and the natives, snake-root. Though there are many flowers intrinsically more beautiful, I do not know one more quaintly original, than this: shooting up, in dark wet woods, by roots of trees, old walls, or among dead leaves, pure and white and lonely and strangely suggestive of some wild individuality, silently symbolical of old sweet stories of Naiads and Dryads and Russian Rusalkas and Heine Loreleis.